Professor and Researcher
"I see toxic people" research on toxic behavior in League of Legends
In this research, we aimed to investigate and understand the perception of League of Legends players regarding toxic behavior. We wanted to understand what are the most recurring actions in the game and also to compare male and female perceptions. We did a survey with 1,000 players in all Brazilian regions.
Scope: Paper presented at 43rd Brazilian Congress of Communication Sciences, 2020, virtual.
Duration: June to September 2020.
Authors: Gabriela B. Kurtz and Brenda Ribeiro Leal
Click here to read the full paper (in Portuguese)
Context
League of Legends is one of the most popular games today. The company responsible for the development and game publishing, Riot Games, announced that, in 2019, the title reached the mark of 8 million concurrent players per day around of the world. The behavior of players is an issue that has been problematized both by the League of Legends community itself, and in academic research. Although there are a lot of researches about LoL, we couldn't find large-scale quantitative surveys with the players, which we thought would be useful for the company to understand their players and to fight toxic behaviors.
Main research question: What is the perception of Brazilian players about toxic behavior in League of Legends?
In a hurry? Click here to jump to Results!
Methodology
(or how we managed to get 1,000 responses in less than 2 weeks)
We conducted a survey with a structured quantitative survey and distributed it online through the Google Forms platform, obtaining 1004 respondents between the 15th and 29th of September 2020 (49,7% male - 49,3% female - from 15 years-old up).
In order to gather that many responses, we created Instagram and Facebook pages and put Social Ads to gather the users. We also promised that we would make a raffle with in-game items for everyone that finished the survey. Here you can see an example of the ads:
On total, we spent less than 40 CAD in three campaings, that differed in segmentation (gender) and texts. In the image below, you can see the performance of one of the ads.
In this particular campaign, for example, we had a CTR of 5,73%, considered high for social media ads. We also built trust in the subjects by creating an Instagram page to explain our motivation and to show them it was a safe research to participate. We also published the results of the raffle there. Click here to see the page. All of those actions led to a successful propect of players.
We segmented the survey by gender, age, ability and predominant role in the game, and other socio-demographic features that were not explored in this paper. We asked them to rate in a scale from 0 to 5 how frequently they perceived specific toxic behaviors in-game. We picked up 25 toxic behaviors based on literature and on our experience as players. Then, we analyzed the intensity of occurencies using Microsoft Excel and compared gender perceptions.
Results
Through the analysis we could see what were the most recurrent toxic behaviors perceived by the League of Legends players. Among the 25 behaviors listed, 5 of them were seen more frequently by the majority (more than 50%) of players:
- Chat messages complaining about me or my team mates;
- Use of pings, speeches and/or emotes in an excessive way to tease or call mine or my team mates' attention;
- Steal "farm" (money) that was supposed to be another team mates' possession;
- Steal "kills" hat were supposed to be another team mates'.
- Ask for the team to surrender when realizing the game is not going into a desired direction,
We could also see some gendered perceptions. The majority of women perceived more sexist insults and directly related to the female gender, as we expected. However, we did not expect behaviors related to greed to be more perceived by the female players, which opens up new possibilities for qualitative research, seeking to understand the reasons for this.
Besides the various possibilites to continue the studies, this research can be useful for the game developers and product designers to build a better environment in the game.
If you're a nerd like me, you may also like...
I wrote a lot of articles on games. Mostly are in Portuguese, but you can find some of them in English. These are ones I reccomend:
Conservatism and toxic masculinity in gamer culture: An approach to Magic: The Gathering
Thiago Falcão, Tarcízio Macedo, Gabriela Kurtz
In: Matrizes, vol. 15, no. 2, 2021, pp. 251-277
Click here to read the full article
The “not so” Beautiful Game: a study on Brazilian players of the fantasy soccer game Cartola FC
Gabriela Kurtz, João Pedro Araújo
In: DiGRA '19 - Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix
Click here to read the full article